Month: October 2018

It is October and there are still a lot of tourists visiting Dublin city and Trinity College. So as the weather last week was dry and mild I took a few pictures on my way to work. At 7 am Dublin was reasonably quite. I feel lucky to work where many people go on holidays.

Looking back into my personal diary I have been writing since I was 16, I wrote on 10 June 1981, on my first day in Ireland:

“Irland wird mein Land werden, eher als Amerika oder Frankreich….“ (Ireland will be my country, more so then Amerika or France….)

At that time, I had only visited the USA and France. I was then 20 years old. On the day I arrived in Ireland I had met a few Irish people and had some conversations applying my broken English. Already then, I noticed the kindness and approachability of the Irish people, their friendly smiles and willingness to help a stranger. On my drive from the airport, I had seen some of the Irish landscape, the soft hills of the countryside with its thousand shades of green, the beautiful and rugged east coast. I must have already felt that Ireland was right for me.

I left Ireland again in July 1992, to start my undergraduate studies. Thereafter I lived, studied and worked in New York, USA, in London, UK, in Brussels, Belgium and in Munich Germany, but eventually came back to Ireland in 1987 – for good!

As predicted the weather is changing! Storm Callum is on the way and if the weather forecast is correct we are in for some extreme weather! As my pictures show, this morning all looks still very peaceful – the calm before the storm.

Met Éireann , the national meteorological service, has issued a status orange weather warning for the storm, which will hit Ireland tonight, bringing gales of up to 130km/h along coasts and the possibility of local flooding.

Today is the 10th October, it is 19 degrees Celsius and the sun is shining. What a treat! So during my lunch hour I went for a quick walk in St. Stephen’s Green, a public park in the centre of Dublin city, not far from my place of work, Trinity College. I took a few pictures, to capture the autumnal feeling of today.

This morning I went to my usual Sunday training session in my powerlifting gym. During my rest periods between lifts, I watched a group of lifters preparing for a competition. They all looked fearsome, strong, and aggressive. Many had tattoos and body piercing. Some had tribal haircuts. The athletes growled and shouted before lifts, some stamped their feet. Loud heavy metal music played from the sound system, so everybody was shouting to communicate. Somebody walking into this gym for the first time would probably find it quite scary.
Having been going to this gym for over a year I soaked up the atmosphere, wondering about all this terrifying display of aggressiveness. I have to admit that I too engage in this behaviour, in powerlifting competitions particularly, where I know I have to push out the boat. There are certain routines I go through to get the adrenaline flowing, perhaps to get into fight mode, to push myself to lift heavier than ever, to win and break records. I growl, through up my arms, I hit my weightlifting belt.
To find out why athletes display aggressive routines before lifting heavy weights, I turned to sport science and existing knowledge to find out what is known about aggressive behaviour in sport, in particular weightlifting. I found out that in sport there seems to be a difference made between hostile aggression and instrumental aggression. So maybe aggression is not always a bad thing? It appears instrumental aggression can help to focus and increase performance.
But what about aggression at work, aggression towards others? Surely that type can only be hostile. We likely think of someone who is loud, maybe angry, probably has a bullying manner, talks over people, throws their weight around etc. It is a very negative, emotional image. Aggression does not belong into the workplace, schools and other institutions. It has a negative effect on people’s health and wellbeing. So perhaps anybody feeling the need to be aggressive and cannot control it should try channeling it into sport – applying the instrumental kind!